What I've been reading

I just finished a book, which is getting annoyingly rare these days. I walk an hour plus every day now (I stopped taking the terrible neighborhood bus because it's terrible) plus 20 minutes on the subway per day. Which seems like a lot of time to spend reading except that it's not the easiest thing in the world to walk and read at the same time. Alison made it a little easier since she bought me a nifty reading light for a pre-Christmas gift. It still takes me about a month to read a book unfortunately. This book I just read is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Alison had heard of these folks before but of course I'm ignorant and had not.

The book started out very slow...the whole beginning of the book was a lesson on the mechanics of evolution (why we evolved, and stuff). It was a strange way to write this book, with a lot of very technical scientific writing mixed in with language pandering to the completely non-scientific. It felt a little trite to the scientist in me, but also a little muddling to the non-geneticist in me.

It got way more interesting toward the end, with a lot of stats about the human ruination of the environment. I think that everybody should at least read the last half of this book to get a better understanding of our impacts, in case you don't already know. It's leading me to greatly reduce my meat intake (not because of my health, or the high price of good meat, or the cow farts, or the fertilizer in the waterway, or even my lovely wife's aversion to it, but rather simply because it turns out to be an incredibly inefficient way to get our food energy, and would make much more sense in terms of sustainability to eat vegetables instead).

My main conclusion drawn from this book is that there is basically no hope for the human race. I have felt this way for awhile to a certain degree, but the way we're headed in this book seals the deal. People, we are screwed.

Next I'm going to read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I hope this book cheers me up by thinking about what will happen to the world once we've destroyed ourselves. Alison already read this book, and wrote a blog post about it.

It's unfortunate that we as a species have decided that it's our right to do whatever we want to to make us happy at the cost of everything else on this planet, but there it is. It's also unfortunate that when we go down we're going to take with us an unprecedented number of species away from this world. The generalists will survive, cockroaches and rats and such. In a world devoid of lots of the species that usually fill the ecological niches present in this world, at least there should be a species explosion to fill them in rapid (geologically) order, yay!